Eric Rohmer

Eric Rohmer, who died yesterday aged 89, became the most durable film-maker of
the French New Wave. Although he was overshadowed at first by more
apparently innovative figures – Godard, Truffaut and Chabrol – he outlasted
them, and in his seventies was still making movies the public wanted to see.
By that time, Truffaut had died, while Godard and Chabrol had lost their
edge.

Actress Laurence de Monaghan on the set of the film 'Le Genou de Claire', directed by Eric Rohmer.Photo: JEAN LOUIS ATLAN/SYGMA/CORBIS

7:11PM GMT 11 Jan 2010

Rohmer differed from his New Wave colleagues in putting the emphasis more on words than images, though he was no slouch in the pictorial department. His characters yakked more than any others in cinema, constantly analysing their feelings and moral predicaments.

Eric Rohmer

But the conversations that peppered his films were not made up of party small-talk; on the contrary, they were generally conducted on a high philosophical plane, and were more likely to turn on pages from Pascal than on recipes or fashion. Rohmer, like Bresson, was a Roman Catholic film-maker rather than a film-maker who happened to be Roman Catholic.

He carried his audience with him because the older he grew, the younger his outlook on life became. His characters were seldom middle-aged, often barely into their twenties, yet he had a knack for finding words and attitudes that people far younger than himself might adopt. As a result, his last movies felt more springlike than those he made at the start of his career. "Instead of asking myself what subjects were most likely to appeal to audiences," he said, "I persuaded myself that the best thing would be to treat the same subject six times over, in the hope that by the sixth time the audience would come to me."

All but a few of his works therefore formed part of interconnected clusters of films. There were no recurring characters (though he often used actresses several times at different stages in their lives). The films were linked, however, by a common theme or approach.

After the commercial and critical failure of his first feature film, Le Signe du Lion (1959), he embarked, between 1962 and 1973, on a collection of pictures that he called Six Moral Tales, not always filmed in numerical order. He called La Collectioneuse (1967) number four, for example, followed in 1969 by number three, My Night with Maud.

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The pattern running through his work was not personal whim but based on a well thought-out strategy: "It's much more difficult," he argued, "for a distributor to put up arguments and criticisms about a scenario which is part of a group rather than an isolated script."

During his lifetime, as each new film was greeted with critical acclaim, few recalled how sniffy they had been about his early work.

Youthful and exuberant though his films were, and fixated on love and personal affinities, none was ever about sex. That whole dimension of life was missing. Rohmer's characters fell in love only with each other's minds. He gave the impression that physical attraction, everywhere apparent in the films of Truffaut and Chabrol, was somehow beneath him.

Eric Rohmer was not his real name. He was born Jean-Marie Maurice Schérer on April 4 1920 at Tulle. An obsessively private person, he was cavalier even about his date of birth, sometimes admitting to December 1 1920, at other times to April 4 1923.

Not that he was vain, just secretive. He seldom had his picture taken and once attended the New York premiere of one of his films sporting a pantomime moustache. Even his mother, it was said, died unaware that her son and Eric Rohmer were one and the same.

He taught literature at a school in Nancy from 1942 to 1950, during which time he published a novel, Elizabeth, in 1946, using the pen-name Gilbert Cordier. Moving to Paris as a freelance journalist in the late Forties, he began to attend the Cinémathèque Française and was soon mad about movies.

Specialising increasingly in film criticism, he joined Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard in 1950 to set up a short-lived film magazine called La Gazette du Cinéma. All three also began writing for the influential Cahiers du Cinéma, where they helped formulate a policy known as the politique des auteurs. This was the then radically new theory that not only art films but Hollywood ones, too, could be analysed in terms of the personal style of their directors.

Until the mid-Fifties, he signed contributions under his own name, but as Cahiers's fame spread, he adopted the pseudonym by which he became universally known – in order to conceal from his bourgeois parents that he was engaged in anything so ephemeral as film criticism. In 1956 he became editor-in-chief of Cahiers, a post he held until 1963, when he was ousted by a new generation of Marxist critics.

In 1957, with Claude Chabrol, he published a pioneering study of Alfred Hitchcock, relating his work to the then little known fact of Hitchcock's Catholic upbringing. In particular, the book identified a common theme in Hitchcock's work – the transference of guilt – as reflected in such films as Strangers on a Train and I Confess. It was one of the most influential film books since the Second World War, casting new light on a film-maker hitherto considered a mere entertainer.

As a New Wave film-maker, Rohmer was first out of the gate. His debut was a 16mm short in 1951 called Charlotte et Son Steak, with Godard as the only actor. But his first feature, Le Signe du Lion (1959), was a disaster. About a Dutch composer stranded in Paris in August (under the zodiacal sign of Leo) and awaiting a legacy that's been delayed in the post, it had touches of Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo, the realist poets of pre-war French cinema, but was not what audiences wanted to see in the first flush of the New Wave.

Driven to eke out a living as best he could, he made two shorts in 1963, La Boulangère de Monceau and La Carrière de Suzanne, which he later named as the first instalments of his planned series of Moral Tales. He also did extensive work for television, including studies of Pascal and the Danish film-maker Carl Dreyer, whose work also focused on Christian themes.

Rohmer was unable to make his second feature film until 1966. La Collectioneuse was shot on a minuscule budget without professional actors in a small house in St Tropez, which served both as the set and their home for the duration. Only the cook was paid – but so little that she fed them on minestrone every day. A tale of love in idleness, it was well received at the Berlin Film Festival, but generally regarded as a divertissement.

The breakthrough came in 1969. Truffaut so loved the script for My Night with Maud that he used his clout to raise the money to make it. It starred Jean-Louis Trintignant as a very Catholic engineer who spies a beautiful young girl at Mass and decides to marry her.

But one wintry day in Clermont-Ferrand, he is unable to get home and must spend the night with a Marxist acquaintance and Maud, a recent divorcee. Through the night, the conversation ranges over predestination, atheism and the Pensées of Pascal, including the famous bet on the need to believe in God (if you're right, you'll reap the benefit; if you're wrong, you'll never know). By dawn, nothing seems as clear-cut as it did the night before.

My Night with Maud transformed Rohmer's prospects, making it easy to finance Claire's Knee (1970), fifth of the Six Moral Tales.

The most ravishing of his films, it is set by Lake Annecy in the Haute-Savoie and hangs on a magic thread. Jean-Claude Brialy is virtuous, with one exception. He'll not be satisfied until he has touched the nubile Claire's knee. How he devises a situation in which he can legitimately do so turns this light comedy into a mock-heroic epic.

Before starting a new series, Rohmer experimented with two contrasting literary adaptations – The Marquise of O (1976), from a novella by Heinrich von Kleist, and Perceval le Gallois (1978).

The latter, an adaptation in rhyming couplets of the 12th-century Grail legend by Chrétien de Troyes, was highly stylised, with metal trees, cardboard castles and a cyclorama sky. Unlike any of his other films, it met with a baffled response, but found a small, loyal army of champions.

In 1980, with The Aviator's Wife, he started a new series, called Comedies and Proverbs. It was less cohesive than the Moral Tales, giving the impression that it joined together stories with little in common.

The best of them were Full Moon in Paris (1984), with Bulle Ogier's daughter Pascale in the last role before she committed suicide, and The Green Ray (1986), in which the last flash of light before sunset allegedly reveals the truth about human relations.

It was a rich series but, like Six Moral Tales, ran out of steam before the end. The last films, My Girlfriend's Boyfriend and Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (both 1987), were treading water. The Tree, the Mayor and the Médiathèque (1993) and Rendez-vous in Paris (1995), which followed, were generally regarded as potboilers.

But in 1989 he began yet another series, based on the four seasons, beginning with A Tale of Springtime, in which a daughter fixes up her father with a lady friend. A Tale of Winter (1992) turned on mistaken addresses, with nods to Shakespeare, followed in 1996 by a beach comedy in which a young man hopelessly complicates his love life by triple-dating (A Tale of Summer) and finally by A Tale of Autumn (1998), which was all about viniculture. Collectively they amounted to a celebration of life the whole year round.

Rohmer remained active in his last years, choosing to focus on period drama with The Lady and the Duke and Triple Agent.

His last film, The Romance of Astrée and Celadon, came out in 2007. Typically the romance was treated in a reflective, almost chaste manner.

Eric Rohmer married, in 1957, Thérèse Barbet, with whom he had two sons.